These exciting and humorous stories have activities embedded within them to teach vocabulary, phonological awareness, and language skills. Surprises in the story plots and endearing illustrations build anticipation for the next page!

Each story introduces nine to sixteen vocabulary words. Seven pages of activities are interspersed throughout each book, so you can easily direct learning within the context of the story. Children build vocabulary as they hear and use the vocabulary in new contexts and interact with the words repeatedly. The illustrated activities include:

Casey's Grumpy Day—Casey chameleon camouflages himself throughout the day. Can your students find him in the pictures? Teach words like adventure, disguises, lizard, obvious, and more.

A Visit to the Zoo—Talking animals at the zoo help children surprise their teacher. Vocabulary words include announcement, chuckled, dangerous, predators, and more.

An Interesting Ride—Cleo gets her wish when an unusual pet joins her on the bus ride to school. Teach words like glance, imagine, pretend, stare, and more.

Meals for Kids—Everyone at the restaurant is excited when Audrey adds foods like Deli Dino and Swamp Juice to the children's menu. The vocabulary words include dessert, menu, scrumptious, spectacular, and more.

Community Helpers Disappear—Why are community helpers disappearing one-by-one? Help Max solve the mystery! Teach words like firefighter, librarian, principal, vanish, and more.

Vocabulary knowledge is strongly correlated to reading comprehension proficiency and school achievement. Children who start school with poorly developed vocabulary skills will remain academically behind their peers without robust instruction (Beck, McKeown, & Kucan, 2002).

Reading aloud and including discussion and questions about the story are effective teaching strategies to developing language and vocabulary skills in preschoolers (Schwanenflugel, Neuharth-Pritchett, Blake, Hamilton, & Restrepo, 2003).

Elaborating vocabulary instruction by using tasks like comparing, identifying the core meaning, and linking the word to previous experience are a few of the methods proven to teach vocabulary skills to children (Ellis, 2002).

Teaching new vocabulary definitions is an ineffective way for students to grasp the meaning (Buehl, 2005).

The Early Vocabulary Storybooks series incorporates these principles and is also based on expert professional practice.

Author(s)

Rosemary Huisingh

Biography

Rosemary Huisingh, M.A., SLP,has been a speech-language pathologist since 1970 and co-owner, co-founder, and researcher for LinguiSystems since 1977. She is the proud mother of three amazing daughters Beth, Megan, and Carrie who was the inspiration for several of the stories.

Introduction

Your students will be exposed to common and some not-so-common words in these Early Vocabulary Storybooks. They can and they will learn these unfamiliar words with repeated readings and your excellent instruction. Thanks for all you do for children with language impairments.